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Brussels French une fois: Transfer-induced innovation or system-internal development?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 July 2005

JEANINE TREFFERS-DALLER
JEANINE TREFFERS-DALLER
Affiliation:
University of the West of England, Bristol
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Abstract

In language contact studies, specific features of the contact languages are often seen to be the result of transfer (interference), but it remains difficult to disentangle the role of intra-systemic and inter-systemic factors. We propose to unravel these factors in the analysis of a feature of Brussels French which many researchers attribute to transfer from (Brussels) Dutch: the adverbial use of une fois. We compare the use of this particle in Brussels French with its occurrence in corpora of other varieties of French, including several that have not been influenced by a Germanic substrate or adstrate. A detailed analysis of the frequency of occurrence, the functions and the distribution of the particle over different syntactic positions shows that some uses of une fois can be traced back to sixteenth-century French, but that there is also ample evidence for overt and covert transfer (Mougeon and Beniak, 1991) from Brussels Dutch.

Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 8 , Issue 2 , August 2005 , pp. 145 - 157
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2005

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Footnotes

I am very grateful to Kate Beeching and Penelope Gardner-Chloros for allowing me to study their corpora, and to Kate Beeching, Sera De Vriendt, Jean-Marc Dewaele, Michel Francard, Elisabeth van der Linden and Raymond Mougeon for their comments on earlier versions of this paper. All remaining errors are mine.